Before You Now: Capturing the Self in Portraiture and Before You Now: Photographic Transmutation, now at the Lancaster Museum of Art and History through April 13th is a wide ranging exhibition presented in partnership with Local Access and LACMA as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program. The compelling exhibition features the works of Naida Osline, uncovering the plant world with Botany of Transcendence; Andrew K. Thompson, with A Sky Full of Holes; Ellen Friedlander, with the exquisite portraiture of her exhibition The Soul Speaks; Brad Miller, with his shimmering Water Shadows; and Osceola Refetoff, with his dynamic Magic and Realism. Each artist has a different approach, but all of the works comprise a potent mix of the experimental and the traditional. Full coverage of the full exhibition is upcoming.
Osceola Refetoff’s Magic and Realism, presented on the museum’s mezzanine gallery, features the artist’s stunning use of both infrared and pinhole photography. Dreamy and surreal – while also staying firmly in tune with a sense of place, Refetoff deals with subjects as diverse as climate change and the lure of the open road, covering a wide range of physical territory from Anarctica and Svalbard in the Arctic Circle, to Palm Springs, LA, and the Mojave Desert.
There are hot pink palms and lawns in a brilliantly alien world of an altered Palm Springs, above, while in the artist’s “Proteus Rising,” below, a soft focus icy blue creates a poignant look at the changing climate in Antarctica.
Proteus Rising
The diffused light of a chandelier is a perfect metaphor for Los Angeles in all its glamor and the grief of broken dreams. In “Moon Under Virgo Bay,” taken in Danskoya, Svalbard, a blue orb of sea, populated by a small ship, forms a reverse planet. Intense blue water beneath snow and ice swirls around a darker ink blot of deeper water – like a black hole beyond the Milky Way, ready to consume the known-world from the center out.
Throughout Magic and Realism, in the many different series that the exhibit pulls from, Refetoff’s meticulous technique includes modified digital cameras, analog filters, and pinhole devices. But, his perfection of technique takes a back seat to the lustrous colors and compelling pull of his subjects. With a background in filmmaking, Refetoff brings to the photographic art world a keen sense of visual dynamics, a stroke of noir, a hint of the Fellini-esque, and a bold design asethetic that lifts the most common of vistas into a higher realm.
Through his lens, we observe the mirrored sheen of a truck on an empty highway; a spin of white clouds down a long, linear, vanishing point of a road; a whirring section of an amusement park ride; and a row of mustard yellow golden palms.
Rock-O-Plane
These are among the many startling, significant images on display.Two of Refetoff’s artworks that already have a home in MOAH’s permanent collection, the pinhole exposure of “Blue Hopper,” shot in the Mojave, and the LA-set “Day Tripping” are also a part of the wide-ranging exhibition.
Duplexity (from the series Chromatopia)
More of the MOAH exhibition ahead. Keep one eye turned to your cameras, and the other to this site.
- Genie Davis; photos provided by the artist